This is a snapshot of my work on "GXLame." GXLame is an MP3 encoder based off of LAME v3.98.4 and v3.99b0 which has been heavily optimized for high-quality, low-bitrate VBR encoding. It is similar in concept to other popular encoders at these bitrates such as some AAC codecs, Vorbis mods, and so forth at bitrates down to 56kbps. This codec does not rely on aggressive lowpassing or resampling to acheive these low bitrates, and the quality aims to be acceptable at much lower bitrates than have come to be expected of the standard. Here's a rough idea of what to expect:

The range 0-35 is where the most tuning took place. The codec accepts input from stdin and can be used in foobar2000 (and many other audio rippers/managers/converters) by following any of the guides for LAME, but with a different commandline. For instance, one can easily import CD audio into foobar2000 and convert the tracks with the simple commandline: GXLame-t5.3 -S - %dFor greatly increased encoding speed, add "-f". To target a different quality level, add "-Vx" ('x' here means a number like 30, which would produce average bitrates somewhat close to 96kbps according to the above table).

This is an early test release. Although some great progress is being made, it is not completely tuned, stable, or optimized. Then again, codecs never are and probably never will be. I want to gather user feedback, so use this puppy to compress whatever audio you will. Please note that lossy transcoding is an especially bad idea with GXLame. It relies so heavily on the psymodel and noise shaping that any artifacts present in the original--even inaudible ones in a transparent encode--may rebound here with a great vengeance. Particular culprits are transient smearing and additional high frequency distortion. If you must transcode, at least resample to a different frequency first (for instance, add "--resample 48" to the commandline when re-compressing/transcoding standard CD audio).

Grab a look at the changelog and older versions in the uploads thread here. Be sure to provide your opinions, discussions, impressions, test results, and whatever other witty banter you might deem applicable in this thread!

Right now, go forth and test it on your music, soundtracks, speech tracks (for speech, I recommend GXLame -V0 -mm --resample 16) -- I'm looking for tests for any regressions that might have been introduced in t5.3 since t5.2.